In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Created a Dystopian Vision …

Ultra-tall high-ris­es against dark skies. A huge dis­tance between the rich and the poor. Rob­ber barons at the helm of large-scale indus­tri­al oper­a­tions that turn man into machine. Machines that have become intel­li­gent enough to dis­place man. These have all been stan­dard ele­ments of dystopi­an visions so long that few of us could man­age to imag­ine a grim future with­out includ­ing at least a cou­ple of them. We’ve all seen these ele­ments used before, and they owe much of their stay­ing pow­er to the impact they first made in Fritz Lang’s cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle Metrop­o­lis, which pre­miered 98 years ago. Many imi­ta­tions have since passed through pop­u­lar cul­ture, most of which haven’t mas­tered the tech­niques that gave the orig­i­nal its pow­er.

“Set in a futur­is­tic urban dystopia, the film por­trays a divid­ed soci­ety where the wealthy elite live in lux­u­ri­ous sky­scrap­ers while the oppressed work­ing class toil under­ground,” writes Pruethicheth Lert-udom­pruk­sa at the IAAC blog. “The film explores themes of class strug­gle, social inequal­i­ty, and the dehu­man­iz­ing effects of indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

One of those the­me’s strongest icons is the Tow­er of Babel, a loom­ing sky­scraper that “sym­bol­izes the stark divi­sion between the priv­i­leged and the oppressed.” As Paul Bat­ters writes at the Sil­ver Screen Clas­sics blog, “like the zig­gu­rats of Ur, the pyra­mids and tem­ples of Egypt,” that build­ing and oth­er ele­ments real­ized by the film’s ground­break­ing visu­al design add up to a tit­u­lar “city that dom­i­nates human­i­ty.”

The loss of human­i­ty is the prime con­cern of the Junkies video essay at the top of the post, which explains sev­er­al ways Lang and his col­lab­o­ra­tors con­vey that phe­nom­e­non through light, shad­ow, and per­spec­tive — light, shad­ow, and per­spec­tive being the main tools avail­able to a black-and-white silent film. The One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma video essay just above cov­ers more such aspects of the pic­ture’s con­struc­tion, as well as its his­tor­i­cal con­text: “In nine­teen-twen­ties Europe, a rad­i­cal form of nation­al­ism called fas­cism was com­ing to promi­nence, and six years after the film’s release, Lang found him­self exiled to Amer­i­ca for his refusal to join the Nazi par­ty.”

For quite some time, the ver­sions of Metrop­o­lis that peo­ple could see were cen­sored or oth­er­wise incom­plete cuts; only in 2008 did it under­go a com­plete restora­tion. But now, it’s eas­i­er than ever to see that its “win­ning com­bi­na­tion of cam­era shots and angles, light­ing con­trasts, and shot com­po­si­tion real­ly do well to depict human­i­ty as becom­ing sub­servient to tech­nol­o­gy. And so, per­haps today, more so than in 1927, it is eas­i­er to read the mes­sage that Lang is try­ing to por­tray through the cin­e­mat­ic devices he employs.” Watch­ing the impov­er­ished work­ers of Metrop­o­lis become part of the machine they work for, while its idle rich “become part of the machine by sub­mis­sion [to] plea­sure,” we might reflect upon the astute­ness of the choice to set the film’s sto­ry in the year 2026.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Behold Beau­ti­ful Orig­i­nal Movie Posters for Metrop­o­lis from France, Swe­den, Ger­many, Japan & Beyond

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.